"I have something sad to tell you..."

My mother sat on the side of my bed. All my life when she woke me up she’d just call my name a few times, in a low tone of voice. That morning she didn’t. I guess she thought that I’d feel her presence. It was sunny out; I’d only been home from college for a few days, looking forward to summertime. It was our beloved aunt Pat’s birthday and the day before my little brother was to turn five. We were hoping — hoping — to go to Turtle Back Zoo for his birthday and then get pizza. The only times my mother had ever said “I have something sad to tell you” were when my grandparents died, and when my uncle was killed. That awful feeling came over me. But the sad news that day was that Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, died after being shot the night before.

Our family admired him for his opposition to racial discrimination and especially for America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. We are a family of do-gooders — doctors, nurses, occupational and psychotherapists, social workers, Tai Chi practitioner, teachers and other professions related to caring for people and promoting the greater good. To our mother, herself a social worker, he was an advocate for human rights and social justice, a symbol of service and accomplishment. He was Catholic, as we were, and thought that government could be a force for helping the less fortunate and fostering equality.

Robert Kennedy was campaigning for president when he heard of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Yesterday my friend Jane sent me a transcript of the speech he gave to the people who came to see him, before his scheduled speech. He spoke from the back of a truck and started by saying, “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.”

He went on to say, “In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in…what we need in the United States is not division… not hatred… not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

“So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

“We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence…not the end of lawlessness…not the end of disorder.

“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

We didn’t go to the zoo that weekend; rather, we stayed in the house, on our parents’ bed, watching the mourners wrapped around the blocks, going in and coming out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the funeral Mass when Leonard Bernstein conducted a Mahler symphony and Andy Williams sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And then the funeral train that took him from NY to Washington and Arlington. Just as we’d done nine weeks before when MLK’s casket was put on a farm wagon, pulled by two mules in a mostly silent procession except for people singing freedom songs that were sung during the marches in which he had participated.

For those of us who lived through the often choppy and often idealistic 1960’s, Martin’s death at the age of 39 and Robert’s death at the age of 42 — both from gunshots — were cataclysmically traumatic events and among the most severe blows to racial equality in our history. Their deaths were separated by 63 days. That was 52 years ago. How sobering to see what has happened in our country during the past ten days. I wonder had they both lived, how much farther along in that journey for equality we would be. I wish we could hear that speech again.